NOTED WITH PLEASURE

Published: January 10, 1988

Hauling the Nothingness What does a congregation of poets remind you of? This is Lyubomir Nikolov, a Bulgarian writer, describing ''The Poets of Iowa'' in ''The World Comes to Iowa: Iowa International Anthology'' (Iowa State University), edited by Paul Engle, Rowena Torrevillas and Hualing Nieh Engle.

They always arrive en masse: like a litter of porcupines, the soft underbellies and crackling needles, impaled on which tremble apples of what they know. Casting golden shadows, surely they come from the woods, because, close up, they smell of grass and trampled mushrooms. Their memories gone now, they slump on the green chairs, their backs hunched like the sagging spines of books that hold the unwritten poems of the world. They are poets at the center of America. And the sounds of two oceans echo to them like a bone snapping, broken against a tender knee. They are Brahmins waiting for Buddha to call them, shaking all over for having forgotten his language. I watch them, plunging into the high cornfields - wandering horses, all distracted, but straining muscles to haul the nothingness; their teeth show like yellow kernels clenched in the cobs. At the Margin of Consciousness Most people use the word ''grotesque'' as a vague pejorative. Geoffrey Galt Harpham tells us what it really means in ''On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature'' (Princeton University).

When we use the word ''grotesque'' we record, among other things, the sense that though our attention has been arrested, our understanding is unsatisfied. Grotesqueries both require and defeat definition: they are neither so regular and rhythmical that they settle easily into our categories, nor so unprecedented that we do not recognize them at all. They stand at a margin of consciousness between the known and the unknown, the perceived and the unperceived, calling into question the adequacy of our ways of organizing the world, of dividing the continuum of experience into knowable particles. . . The word designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language. It accomodates the things left over when the categories of language are exhausted; it is a defense against silence when other words have failed. . . . Its widespread use indicates that significant portions of experience are eluding satisfactory verbal formulation. Growing Old and Disgruntled No one ages so badly as a colorful romantic. This is Stephen Spender remembering the painter Augustus John in 1955. It is from ''Stephen Spender: Journals 1939-1983,'' edited by John Goldsmith (Oxford University).

I saw Augustus John tonight about the drawings he has done for his Encounter article on gypsies. I called on him at 14 Percy Street where he occupies the flat of his daughter Poppet. He had left all the doors open so I went right upstairs to find him sitting in a room all alone at a desk. I took him out to dinner at the Queen's restaurant in Sloane Square. He seemed relieved when I told him I had my car and I could drive him there. He said he hated dining in restaurants where he was not familiar with the waiters. He said several things which seemed to show that he did not feel at all at home in today's world. He said he hated London, and he hated where he lived in Hampshire. He also said several times that he hated settling down, and that he was thinking of leaving his family. We talked about Wyndham Lewis and he told me that when Wyndham Lewis went blind, he sent him a telegram imploring him above all not to give up his criticism of art. When he told me this I very nearly burst out laughing. It seemed such an ironic message to send. Some Don'ts for Poets Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who died in 1987, was Brazil's best-known 20th-century poet. In these two stanzas of ''Looking for Poetry,'' he offers ironical, elder-statesman advice to young poets. This is from his ''Travelling in the Family: Selected Poems'' (Random House). Don't sing about your city, leave it in peace. Song is not the movement of machines or the secret of houses. It is not music heard in passing, noise of the sea in streets that skirt the borders of foam. Song is not nature or men in society. Rain and night, fatigue and hope, mean nothing to it. Poetry (you don't get it from things) leaves out subject and object. Don't dramatize, don't invoke, don't question, don't waste time lying. Don't get upset. His Ugliest Painting Van Gogh said that in his painting ''The Night Cafe'' he was trying to ''express the power of darkness.'' He describes the painting in a letter to his brother Theo, which is quoted in ''Stranger on the Earth: A Psychological Biography of Vincent van Gogh'' by Albert J. Lubin (Holt).

The picture is one of the ugliest I have done. . . . I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green. The room is blood-red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four citron-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green. Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens in the figures of little sleeping roughnecks, in the empty, dreary room, in violet and blue. The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a pink nosegay. The white coat of the patron, awake in a corner of that furnace, turns citron-yellow, pale luminous green.